Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  A long, drifting melody of ineffable tenderness begins the second movement. For its accompaniment Beethoven mobilizes one of his first symphonic monorhythmic stretches: a lilting dotted figure that a future time would call a tango rhythm. The figure goes on and on, gentle and then insistent, an accompaniment developed like a theme. At the end of the movement the tango motif comes to rest in the timpani, playing quietly unaccompanied, like a dancer taking a few wistful turns alone at the end of the evening. At the close of the first movement of the Eroica, the Hero theme finds its rightful place in the home key, in its proper instrument, the horn. In the Fourth Symphony, the second movement’s rhythm finally arrives in the timpani alone. In both cases it is as if an idea were searching through the course of a movement not only for its home key but also for its true instrumental avatar, and finds it at the end as another kind of homecoming. This is a kind of musical and psychological logic that Beethoven surely invented. The Fourth’s third movement is a romping scherzo, its two-beat theme kicking against the three-beat meter. The finale is a breathless, madcap moto perpetuo, like the gayest of final tableaux in a comic opera.

  With the Fourth Symphony Beethoven confirmed his pattern of maximal contrast in pairs of symphonies: dramatic unto tragic in the odd-numbered, joyful unto comic in the even-numbered; muscular and bold scoring in the odd-numbered, warm and rich scoring in the even (though each of the symphonies has its distinctive orchestral sound). In other words, the Fourth Symphony is virtually the anti-Third. It would be the same with the Fifth and Sixth.

  As stunning as any of the dichotomies of the Third and Fourth is the simplification of form, texture, and material represented by the new symphony. One might think that the Fourth is more transparent in form and material than the Third mainly because it was written fast. But the Fifth and Sixth have the same quality. Starting with the Eroica’s enormous, multithemed opening, all the movements of that symphony are complex and unusual in form. Now Beethoven turned from a radical complexity to a radical simplicity, but with a defining new element: simplicity plus a new driving energy. This will be one of the thumbprints of the heroic style. Once he had written on a sketch, “simple and always more simple.” He aspired to the directness of voice he admired in Handel, which Haydn also possessed: the ability to get big effects with the most direct means. Not until his last symphony would he return to movements as complex in form as the Eroica’s.

  Beethoven inherited a tradition that said a symphony ought to be a more public, more populist, less complex genre than chamber music, which is more for connoisseurs. After the Eroica, Beethoven submitted to that tradition but reimagined it from within, as he had done before in genre after genre. After the Fourth, the next four symphonies would be, each in its own way, largely lucid and transparent in form, the material emotionally direct, the whole broadly communicative whether bringing a sob or standing the hair on end, whether conveying a dig in the ribs or a strike at the jugular.

  When Beethoven took up his friend Heinrich von Collin’s play Coriolan in 1807 and agreed to write an overture for its revival, he was working with a story he already knew from two sources: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and Shakespeare’s source in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, where the Greek historian examines celebrated or notorious Roman and Greek figures and draws conclusions about character and morality. Collin used the same plot outline as Shakespeare. After experiencing insults to his pride in Rome, the leading general Coriolan goes over to the enemy Volscians. Then, on the eve of battle, in a confrontation with his mother, Volumnia, and his wife, he is dissuaded from leading an attack on Rome. He pays for that second change of heart with his life. Beethoven, feeling daily insults from the Viennese and yearning to be somewhere else, had to have resonated with this story.

  Collin’s play is more introspective than Shakespeare’s version, concerned with the interior struggle of Coriolan, who finally falls on his sword in despair. That intimate moral and ethical debate also appealed to Beethoven, perennially concerned with those matters. At the same time, his overture suggests he was also thinking of Shakespeare’s more dynamic, more theatrical version of the story.

  Collin’s play vanished from the boards after the revival, but the Coriolan Overture soon became a favorite on orchestral programs. With this piece Beethoven more or less invented what came to be called the “concert overture,” and no less what was to be called the “symphonic poem.” Since the overture needed to evoke the story somehow, and since it was intended to have its own life outside the play, Beethoven could indulge in program music with less risk of being condemned for it. As in the Leonore overtures, he does not so much preface the story as embody it in the music.

  Coriolan was in his current theatrical style, modeled on Cherubini rather than Mozart, lucid and colorful in orchestration, simple in material and structure but starkly powerful in effect. It begins with low-C unisons answered by crashing high chords, each followed by a violent silence. Charged silence is one of the leading motifs of the piece. The music’s cries and silences echo two other evocations of death in his music: the dungeon scene in Leonore and before that the beginning of the Joseph Cantata. Meanwhile we are in Beethoven’s heroic and darkly dynamic C-minor mood, defined earlier in the Pathétique Sonata and other works.

  The introduction gives way to a restless figure that surges on for pages, at once portraying the implacable spirit of Coriolan and foreshadowing his doom. Like the other Beethoven overtures, this one is laid out in sonata form. The lyrical second theme in E-flat major stands for the pleading Volumnia. Their debate grows progressively more heated and never resolves. After a short but tumultuous development section suggesting Coriolan’s inner battle, Beethoven manages a dramatic and psychological masterstroke with the recapitulation. Coriolan’s theme is truncated, harmonically unstable, out of balance: he has lost himself. Volumnia’s theme is extended, more and more urgent as it drives into a coda reprising the fateful introduction, with its glowering low Cs and crashing chords and electric silences. His mother’s anguish is now inside Coriolan, creating a fatal inner conflict.

  At the end we hear the spiritual and physical death of the hero in the dissolution, the bleeding away of his theme, until it sinks to emptiness. The essence of the drama is captured in the journey from the violent silences of the beginning to the deathly silences of the end.18 With Coriolan under his belt, one of the most searingly intense things he had written yet, in his next symphony Beethoven would return to C minor on a larger canvas.

  An Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung review of a Leipzig performance is warmer and more astute than many early reviews of his pieces: “Beethoven’s overture to Collin’s Coriolan . . . is once again a very significant work, written more in the manner of Cherubini than that of B’s previous orchestral works. The character of this overture is grand and serious, to the point of gloominess. It is strictly and learnedly written . . . and is calculated besides to produce much more of a profound than a radiant effect.”19

  The belated premiere of the Triple Concerto in 1808 might imply several things about it, including ambivalence on the part of the composer. Beethoven was an unsentimental and unforgiving judge of his own work, though always ready to make some florins on nearly anything he had in stock. He sold the concerto sometime before getting it played in public (there had been private readings). He had to have known, though, that besides its surprising style, the Triple Concerto was an expensive and impractical number to put on, given that it required three times the usual soloists.

  The first movement, marked Allegro, deals out an intriguing hand in the expression: the opening theme is declaimed quietly in unaccompanied basses, giving it a fateful cast despite the C major. The music brightens and gathers momentum to the first solo entrance, on cello alone. The cello is the main protagonist of the solo trio; its gift for poignant lyricism will be central to the piece. Each soloist enters dutifully on the main theme, and so begins a movement long, rambling, and elegantly beautiful. Beethoven explores solos, duets, a
nd trios with the group, avoiding cadenzas and other soloistic heroics. There is an operatic quality that perhaps spilled over from Leonore.

  Where the first movement’s touches of expressive ambiguity were headed becomes manifest in the second movement, in A-flat major, surely one of the saddest major-key movements ever written. The solo cello sings eloquently throughout. The movement is almost choked off by a quick transition to a finale headed Rondo alla Polacca. The title implies an energetic outing recalling the Polish polonaise. It arrives at the kind of games audiences expected from a rondo finale, including a loping middle section like a parody of a polonaise.

  The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung reviewer knew something was puzzling about this piece, and he didn’t much care for it: “In our judgment . . . this concerto is the least of those by Beethoven in print. In it the composer has loosed the reins of his rich imagination, all too ready to luxuriate exuberantly in its richness.”20 Listeners were used to mainstream Beethoven now, and resistant to anything else. The Triple Concerto never caught on in his lifetime, and scarcely later.

  Of the four large orchestral pieces written between 1804 and 1807, in the wake of the Eroica—Fourth Symphony, Violin Concerto, Triple Concerto, Coriolan—only the last is in the heroic style, with that effect of dynamism and struggle on an epic canvas. Of the three equally significant chamber works Beethoven finished in 1807, none is heroic, but all are close to the level of the Razumovskys in boldness, freshness, and scope. All of them trace more complex emotional arcs than much of his earlier work. In contrast to the symphonies, it becomes harder in the chamber pieces of these years to find a clear expressive line from beginning to end. The narrative becomes more mysterious, more like poetry than storytelling.

  With the Sonata for Cello and Piano in A Major, op. 69, Beethoven returned for the first time since op. 5 to a genre he more or less invented and still more or less owned. The A Major has an air of something settled and incontrovertible. With a quiet, epigrammatic opening theme starting with cello alone, he establishes the central elements. The opening cello line contains in embryo all the themes of the sonata. The piano supplies the second phrase of the theme, setting up a partnership of equals who complete one another’s thoughts. For all its impact, much of the work will be subdued and introspective in tone. Cello and piano inject small cadenzas into the music, as if reflecting on its course. The straightforward A major of the first page is compromised by a turn to a passionate A minor, and that change echoes through the first movement: the expected E major of the second theme is prepared by E minor, and the E major is oddly unsunny. So the essential dynamic of the sonata unfolds as a dialogue of bright and dark, inward and outward.

  By the end of the exposition the music has turned pealingly triumphant. That triumph, however, is the last for a while. The development section is largely quiet, minor key, undramatic except for a furioso ­E-minor outburst in the middle. (The autograph of the development is a maze of scribbling out. Beethoven essentially wrote a revised version of the development on top of the first one, improvising on the page.)21 The recap is expanded and recomposed, developmental, yet for much of it the tone is still quiet and introspective. By the end the music has taken on a quality of reflection and retreat.

  The scherzo in A minor is rhythmically quirky, ironically demonic, irresistible. In the main theme the piano and cello seem unable to agree on the downbeat. It ends nearly inaudibly in sighs and fragments. An aria-like slow movement suddenly breaks off, and we find it was an introduction to the Allegro vivace last movement, which begins with a broad, serene A-major theme that echoes the opening of the first movement. Once again, much of the music is quiet where we expect otherwise. Has the moment of triumph from the first movement vanished for good? No: after a muted and expectant opening of the development, the music finds that tone again. In the coda racing joy is unleashed and prevails to the end, with an introspective pianissimo before the crashing last chords.

  Around this time Beethoven tested the possibilities of a genre he had not touched on since op. 1. His first piano trio in a decade, op. 70, no. 1 in D Major begins precipitously with an energetic unison stride ­downward on a four-note motif, slams to a halt on an out-of-key ­F-natural, then picks up into a quiet, coiled-spring whirlwind notably vehement even for a major-key movement. Beethoven’s response to D major, from the model in his op. 10, no. 3, piano sonata, had been a mixture of traditional and personal. That key, wrote a theorist of the time, “is suited to noisy, joyful, warlike, and rousing things.” So it would be in opp. 10 and 70, but the later work is richer in its emotional and thematic profile. In both pieces Beethoven contrasts the comic ebullience of the outer movements with a radical shift in the middle: the op. 10 slow movement keeningly tragic, the ghostly op. 70 slow movement in D minor another of his sui generis essays. His D-minor mood tended toward deep darkness.

  He had lived and learned a great deal since the op. 10 D Major, one of the finest of his early piano sonatas. In the op. 70 Trio, the tight motivic relations of the early work have been expanded into underlying patterns of rhythm, melodic shape, gesture, psychological consistency. With the F-natural on the first line of the trio he foreshadows tonal excursions throughout the piece to F major, B-flat major, and D minor (so the ebullient first line of the piece is already haunted by a touch of D minor).22 The first movement’s exposition is compact, but it ends up expansive because at the end of the recap it repeats back to the spiky and relentless development. That expansiveness prepares the immense slow movement that occupies the middle of the trio. Early on, that movement gave the work its subtitle of Ghost.

  To say it again, in background and temperament Beethoven was no Romantic, even if in practice he was by 1808 the essential composer for Romantics. If the tone of the weird and the uncanny was central to Romanticism, it was not central to Beethoven. But in the Largo of the Ghost Trio, he set the mark for the weird and uncanny. Much as in the op. 10 Sonata, a downward-fourth motif from the first movement is taken up and made into something a world away. This movement, with its obsessive concentration on one motif, its strange whisperings and flutterings, its spare and bizarre textures, its utterly eerie ending, may have originated as an idea for Collin’s libretto of the Shakespeare Macbeth. If so, this music would have been for the witch’s-cauldron scene that begins the play. It would have made that scene as darkly unforgettable as Florestan’s dungeon in Fidelio.

  In the sketches he took much trouble to make an ending for the ghostly movement that would not resolve the tension but carry it into the finale that follows—no scherzo would fit this piece.23 With a flowing and lighthearted finale the music appears to escape the shades, but in a uniquely organic way: the genial main motif echoes the slow movement’s theme. Dark obsession turned into sunny escape might be an example of Beethovenian dramatic shape, but the reality is not so simple. In the finale something lingers from the shivery second movement, a tone gay on the surface but unsettled beneath. It ends with a triplet fillip echoing the obsessive theme of the “ghost” movement. Ghosts haunt the gaiety. Here Beethoven returns to the psychological subtlety of the op. 18 Quartet in B-flat, where a dancing finale cannot entirely banish La Malinconia.

  If op. 70, no. 1 became famous for its weird middle movement, the whole of no. 2, in E-flat, is quietly, subtly enigmatic. Its color and character are unique in Beethoven, and it lies at a far remove from a heroic E-flat major. The introduction begins with a spare four-part canon, setting up a work with much imitative material and a sometimes archaic tone. An emotional ambiguity hovers, moving unpredictably between tension and warmth. The tone has partly to do with a peculiarity of the violin part: hardly at all in the first movement and only occasionally later does the violin make it up to the bright E string. Beethoven keeps the cello mostly in its low to medium register as well. (Both trios confirm the emancipation of the cello from the bass line that he began in op. 1.) The register of the strings gives the whole piece an oddly subdued effect. At the same time the piano has
a good deal of high passagework, making for striking textures of low strings and high, brilliant piano. The first movement turns to deep-flat keys, including E-flat and A-flat minor and C-flat major, all unbrilliant in the strings. So even what would seem to be the bouncy and happy 6/8 of the first movement’s main theme is strangely inflected by the instrumental coloration.

  The two middle movements are both marked Allegretto, in C major and A-flat major. The second movement is double variations on contrasting themes that still share material, including a “Scotch snap” figure. The first theme flows, the second has a bit of driving “Turkish” tone. Structured like a scherzo but muted and introspective, the third movement is in a flowing three-beat, with two appearances of a trio. The dashing finale returns to brilliant piano figures but remains mostly low and subdued in the strings. A dashing, full-throated coda ends what is, in its subtle way, one of the more unusual pieces of Beethoven’s life.